The guys over at Programmable Web have put together a great site chronicling all of the 'Web 2.0' resources to be found on the internet. In distilled form, they have a mashup matrix which now also includes the intersection of Prodigem's API and del.icio.us.

Looks like I'll be heading to the Open Media Developers Summit taking place the weekend of October 21st in New York. I imagine many of the same people from the first ever vloggercon will be there, but the focus on this one is bringing together grass-roots projects with their more commercial counterparts to create a fun happy place on the internet. Here's a list of participants for the summit (so far).

There was a slight tick in PEP as it was released that at times could cause it to think it wasn't handling proper XML from Prodigem's API. It turns out that when doing an HTTPS 1.1 POST, the chunked-encoding returned could at random times
include hex mixed in with the server response. By tweaking the PEP script to use HTTPS 1.0, it's resolved. So you can either search for "1.1" in your script and change the one occurance to "1.0" or just download PEP with the fix.

On Friday it was reported that BitTorrent Inc. has taken in 8.75 million in venture funding. Certainly this is good for the technology, though I do see them coming in shortly and offering lots of similar types of services as seen on Prodigem. It will be interesting to see how exactly it is packaged, the role of DRM, and what is and is not hooked into their code-base.

But there is lots of content to go around, and I look forward to keep on going after it, doing what I'm doing while continuing to build community web efforts.

Rocketboom, perhaps the most popular video blog on the internet, has installed PEP into their setup allowing them to automatically have torrents created for each video blog they produce. Check out Rocketboom's Prodigem user page and RSS torrent feed.

I got back earlier today from Digimart, the global digital (film) distribution summit, in Montreal. The conference was 2/3 days of sessions on the topics of digital film and on its implications of distribution, both hard-copy and digital. In a word, it was great.

The conference was organized by Daniel Langlois (founder of Soft Image, a pioneer in digital effects ala Jurassic Park) and was truly international in its make-up. Besides numerous Canadian and American film-makers and distributors there were also those from the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Peru and China. And those were just the people I met. But the bottom line is that this group of Independent type film makers were quite convinced that the future of everything film is digital.

Mark Cuban gave the keynote where he discussed HDNet's new "day and date" release strategy where they were going to simultaneously release new movies in cinema on HDnet/cable and on DVD all on the same day. To compensate for this radical approach, initial DVDs would cost perhaps $10 more and they would kick back 1% of sales to the Cinema owners showing their movie to incentivize them to buy into this system. He also mentioned that HDNet would be making available what he called "laptop quality" copies for direct download of their films. I guess even the big boys can't afford to do full quality copies without embracing p2p.

In general I spent a lot of time soaking up knowledge from those in the film industry. For one, I can say that there is a lot of resistance to Hollywood's new "DCI" Digital Cinema Initiative. The general concensus (surprise) is that their new guidelines about showing HD films is all about their control of cinema and not at all about image quality. Though it also seemed the perception was that this was okay because it only shows them continuing to fumble the ball on content delivery allowing in the little guy to come in and provide lower-cost solutions with better image quality. I would say I tend to agree. I would say I'm also glad to watch most of the big guys continue to fumble the ball and provide these opportunities.

And overall, the panel and demo I did on Prodigem seemed to be a home run. Having spent two days in this first-of-a-kind conference sharing and creating a collective knowledge on how to make digital film distribution a reality, it was great to show that this didn't mean that film makers were confined to just selling DVDs from their websites while they wait 3-5 years for IPTV to become a reality. Without a hitch I had recorded the audio from the session before my panel, Cory Doctorow on DRM, and no less than 20 minutes after it ended was I able to show it turned around and ready for massive-scale digital distribution via a torrent. And though this could of course be used to sell movies through Prodigem, it could also be used for providing free outtakes and clips while a movie is even still in production, adding a new marketing arm to movie making.

Let's see where this takes us.

My post to slashdot about PEP went live. I'm about to get on a cross-country flight to Montreal (for digimart) for the rest of the day, servers seem to holding up okay right now, let's hope it stays that way.

Introducing PEP, the Prodigem Enclosure Puller. With Prodigem's just released API, I was knocking around ideas about how to show it off quickly and effectively. I'm pretty happy with this first result. PEP is < 400 lines of PHP code I've thrown together (download it at http://prodigem.com/code/pep/pep.txt) which, when given your Prodigem username, password and an RSS 2.0 feed, will then find all the enclosures in that RSS feed and call into Prodigem to have a torrent created for each one. Automatically. You just run and/or cron the script on your home computer or web-server and PEP does the rest.

This bit of hackery (btw, the code has much room for improvement, please someone run with it) of course needed a good first RSS feed. Enter del.icio.us. Using their RSS feed for popular videos, Prodigem now automatically torrents the most popular videos on the web as decided by the del.icio.us folksonomy. That is to say, what the world wants, the world gets.

You can see the results on our newly created pep_delicious user page or even in pep_delicious's own Prodigem torrent feed. If you'd like to discuss PEP or the API (or this blog), that can be done in Prodigem's Forums.

Looks like it was exactly a year ago that Outfoxed was put up on Torrentocracy. Over 3500 downloads and almost 2 terabytes of traffic later, it's been a good run. But it's not over. In order to keep things consistent over here, we've moved the Outfoxed torrent and the Uncovered torrent from Torrentoracy's separate torrent section and into Prodigem under Jim Gilliam's account. The transition was seemless and the hashes were not changed, so any previous downloader can still seed if they like.

Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons wrote in with some good ideas about license handling. For one, Prodigem isn't yet on the CC 2.5 licenses, but more importantly there are whole swaths of licenses we don't contain or cover. Partly, I should say that this is on purpose. The one thing we do not want to do is overwhelm our users with too many choices. So I have taken Mike's best suggestion and implemented it. There is now an "other" choice available both from the UI and the API where users can manually enter the name and the URL which describes the license they wish to use if it does not appear on our default list. I think this will be a nice middleground for all.

And I'm also thinking about just flipping a switch to turn all my CC 2.0 licenses into 2.5 licenses, but I'm not sure where the differences lie.

A first taker. Adriaan Tijsseling, who maintains ecto (a popular blogging tool), was key in pushing me to use a REST-based API for Prodigem. He's announced that a future version of both the mac and windows variants of ecto will support the API. Looking forward to that :).

I'm pleased to announce our new API which will allow any web-capable application on the internet the ability to use Prodigem's creation, hosting and management of torrents through a nice standards based interface. The docs are located at http://torrentocracy.com/mediawiki/index.php/Prodigem_API (the wiki includes links to a live demo page). All you need is a Prodigem account and as it so happens, for a limited time we've opened up our free Preview Account so that they come with full upload and torrent creation capabilities. That last part is a first for us as well, so get 'em while they're hot (and free).

And as it so happens, we've also nicely integrated the phpBB forum and messaging system into Prodigem so there's now a nice shiny place to discuss new things like the API (http://www.prodigem.com/forums/) or just generally mingle.

So all you internet programming types have a look at the API and tell us what you think. We're excited to see what you come up with now that every web application out there can have a 'make me a torrent' button. Or maybe it will be called a 'save my blog from this slashdotting' button, or perhaps a 'our fanbase is community of people already looking for ways to help us' button, or 'my company is in a crunch, Prodigem to the rescue' button, or...

I've been confirmed as a speaker at DigiMart which is taking place September 22-24 in Montreal. The summit is geared towards filmmakers and how exactly to go digital. I'll be taking part in the discussion on 'New Models on Hyperdistribution'. Looks like an exciting lineup. Though I don't know most of the film names, Mark Cuban has the keynote and Cory Doctorow looks to be discussing DRM = bad.